Posts by Joseph Maddrey

In an era of mainstream PG-13 horror, it's thrilling to delve back into the European erotic horror films of the 60s and 70s - films that gained their reputations by offering highly provocative images, if often at the expense of story. One of the most controversial filmmakers in this vein is Jean Rollin, best known for a series of surrealist vampire films that began with Le Viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire, 1968). In their best moments, these films offer images and scenarios worthy of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali; Rollin strips vampire films (as well as voluptuous actresses) down to their essence - giving us a pure, strange and haunting beauty unencumbered with intellectual agendas.(read more...)

One of the most terrifying monsters in the modern horror film is the murderous child. We can trace this monster back to at least the late 1950s, when an 8-year old girl murdered her classmate and intimidated her mother in The Bad Seed (1956). Not long after, a gaggle of alien pod children took over a quaint British community in Village of the Damned (1960). The notion of malevolent kids continued to horrify audiences well into the 1970s, when Hollywood aligned them with the Devil in wildly popular films like The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). Perhaps the most unique take on the idea is writer/director Larry Cohen’s film It’s Alive (1974), which proposes that future generations of children will become monstrous by necessity. Cohen has said in several i(read more...)

"Do you want to see a ghost?" This tantalizing question mysteriously pops up on the computer screens of six hapless victims in Jim Sonzero's 2006 remake of the Japanese horror film Kairo. Without hesitation, each of the victims click on the link. Viewers who sit down to watch this film would likely respond the same way. After all, isn’t that why we watch horror films? For a glimpse of the unknown? (read more...)

It’s taken me several years to get around to watching Jack Starrett’s 1975 film Race with the Devil – partly because I had heard that it was a poor man’s The Hills Have Eyes. It’s worth stipulating that Race with the Devil was made a year before Wes Craven’s film and that, if it fails to measure up, it is perhaps because Starrett (like the characters in his film) is on relatively untrodden ground. Race with the Devil is a strange hybrid of genres that doesn’t quite work. Part horror film and par(read more...)